A bang and a whoosh – how researchers describe the recent impact of a small meteoroid on the side of a martian hill and a long avalanche of dark, dry dust that stretches more than a kilometre (0.6 mile) down the slope.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted a recent impact crater that will remain a distinctive blemish for decades to come. Finding new craters is not uncommon with six satellites currently orbiting the Red Planet.

The Moon’s Orientale basin is an archetype of “multi-ring” basins found throughout the solar system. New research has enabled scientists to reconstruct Orientale’s formation using data from NASA’s GRAIL mission. It is now thought that the 580-mile-wide feature was created 3.8 billion years ago by an impacting object some 40 miles across travelling at about 9 miles per second.

This striking perspective view from ESA’s Mars Express shows an unnamed but eye-catching impact crater on Mars. This region sits south-west of a dark plain named Mare Serpentis (literally ‘the sea of serpents’), which in turn is located in Noachis Terra (literally ‘the land of Noah’).

Using data from NASA’s Lunar reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists have discovered two geologically young craters — one 16 million, the other between 75 and 420 million years old — in the darkest regions of the Moon’s south pole. Such craters provide valuable information on the frequency of collisions in the solar system.

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